This invention relates to information technology for Internet and presents an alternative way for delivery of Internet content from Web sites. It does not exclude the delivery via telephone but rather supplements it where appropriate. Most of content stored on Web sites is created for promotion of products, services or ideas, and therefore intended for an audience rather than a particular person. And while by its nature the content is intended for broadcast, in current Internet it is delivered individually to each user like mail and phone calls. The result is congestion on routers and servers, and user wastes his time waiting until a page will be downloaded in his computer.
The present invention is an information technology providing Internet access through conventional one-way television channels. The technology eliminates waiting time, facilitates television quality of images, audio and video, and takes away from Internet switched circuits the heaviest traffic preserving their resources for two-way addressable communications such as orders, bills, chats and videoconferences. Initially the technology was developed for television itself in order to take television out of prime time limits and help viewers to deal with uneasy choice among 100 channels currently available in cable and satellite networks. U.S. Pat. No 5,534,911 by the same applicant describes an apparatus for providing a customer of a television system with virtual personal channel that being selected delivers television programs of the most personal interest no matter on which channel and at what time the programs are physically transmitted. The technology facilitates fine-tuned personalized services based on automatic selection and recording of television programs transmitted via one-way channels in broadcast manner. In pending application Ser. No 08/881,934 by the same applicant the concept of virtual personal channel is applied to advertisement in order to provide a new type of advertising, commercial-on-demand, which, in turn, is incorporated with Internet to facilitate a highly automated home shopping system-virtual personal store. In this application, the technology of automatic selection and recording is further developed for delivery of content from Web sources.
There are currently two major developments in the intersection of television and Internet: Internet TV and cable modem. Internet TV provides TV viewers with Internet access via set-top computers. It supposed to be cheaper because the set-top computer doesn""t need a monitor, using TV screen instead. It seems like a spoon that is also a fork on the other end: savings may or may not outweigh inconveniences. However Internet TV has developed hardware, software and services that may be of a great value for future integration of Internet and television. Philips Consumer Electronics, Sony Electronics and Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics of America are manufacturing WebTV, a set-top box based on technology developed by WebTV Networks, a unit of Microsoft. RCA division of Thomson Consumer Electronics introduced another set-top box based on design from Network Computer, Inc., a unit of Oracle Corp. NetChannel Inc., South San Francisco, provides Internet services for the RCA product. Internet TV by itself doesn""t address major Internet problems: long waiting time and superficial search engines retrieving too many useless materials.
The other development, cable modem, is intended to provide high-speed Internet access via cable television lines. While standard modems connected to telephone lines have rate 28.8 to 56 kb/s, cable line can provide a speed up to 27 Mb/s. The most successful project in the field is @Home, Mountain View, Calif., sponsored by TCI, the largest cable TV company. Deployment of cable modems necessitates an expensive conversion of conventional one-way cable TV network into two-way addressable network. In addition, cable modern eliminates only one Internet bottleneck, so called xe2x80x9clast mile connectionxe2x80x9d while there are others. With explosive grows of the number of Internet users, congestion on routers and servers contributes to the annoying waiting time as well especially at rush ours of prime time. And even on local level, Internet users equipped with cable modem share limited resources allocated to their cable neighborhood node.
The common feature of the referred prior art is delivery of all Internet content, including news, entertainment and advertisement, in the usual for current Internet way, i.e. via two-way addressable network. Meanwhile nonaddressable one-way broadcast and two-way addressable service are different and equally important parts of any mature communication infrastructure. On one side we see newspapers, magazines, radio and television, on otherxe2x80x94mail, telephone, facsimile and videoconferences. Those two types of communications are fundamentally different not as much in technology as in domain. While broadcast media dominates in delivery of news, entertainment and advertisement, two-way addressable media supports personal communications and transactions. Switching media domains, whatever innovative it seems to be in theory, looks as media misuse in practice.
As to Internet, its hardware gets faster but number of users grows explosively. Therefore slow connection is a secondary problem, the primary one is the number of recipients served simultaneously. In any addressable system each recipient needs a separate communication and/or computing resource for the time of connection, and therefore only limited number of recipients can be served simultaneously. In a nonaddressable broadcast system all recipients are connected (tuned) to the same channel and thus there is no technical limit for the number of recipients. This fundamental difference between addressable and nonaddressable media will exist forever and neither digital compression nor cable modem can eliminate it.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system delivering Internet content via one-way television channels. An Internet server at a television transmission center downloads Web pages from Web sites and retransmits them in broadcast manner through a television network to simultaneously reach unlimited number of recipients. The server supplies client computers in advance with a timetable file listing all Web pages scheduled for transmission along with time/channel and other data necessary for reception of those pages at the time of their transmission. Client computers are connected to the television network and store individual selection lists of Web pages. The system delivers Web pages to interested and if necessary, authorized users completely eliminating waiting time and providing television quality of images, audio and video. In addition, it takes away from Internet switched circuits the heaviest traffic preserving their resources for two-way addressable communications such as orders, bills, chats and videoconferences.
Another object is a system providing similar service for PC users not connected to a television network but to Internet only. The system delivers Internet content to the users via a one-way TV network and intermediate Internet servers connected to the network. Each server stores selection lists of a group of local PC users and downloads Web pages included in at least one of those selection lists. The size of each served group is limited so to avoid congestion.
A further object of the invention is to provide a powerful, highly automated search engine matching data about Web pages included in the timetable file with data about user""s interests stored in client computer.
A still further object is integration of television and Internet advertising. At transmitting end, the system adds Web page data to television signal carrying a conventional TV commercial. At receiving end, it displays a message on TV screen prompting viewer to order additional information when TV signal contains the data, and then adds the Web page to viewer""s selection list if viewer positively responds to the message. As a result the page will be automatically downloaded at the time of its transmission and presented later on viewer""s request.